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Last week on Twitter I was asked by @southrngurl6489 the following question:

If you had to pick only one thing that makes a blog stand out from its peers, what would you pick and why?

I thought it’d be a good question to open up to a wider audience as its something I’ve touched on quite a few times over the last year or so and because what makes a blogger distinct is often, by definition, something that can vary from blog to blog.

What are you doing to make your blog stand out from the crowd? What have you seen other blogs do that makes them stand out?

Further Reading: Here’s a post I wrote on the topic earlier in the year – The Power of Uniqueness [19 Starting Points for Being a Unique Blogger]

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

What Do You Do With Your Blog to Make it Stand Out from the Crowd?

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What Do You Do With Your Blog to Make it Stand Out from the Crowd?

One of the easiest way to get people to join your Facebook Fan page is to invite all your current Facebook friends to join. However, the process can be quite time consuming if you have a lot of friends. I have over 4,000 friends on Facebook. To invite everyone of them to join my Fan page means I have to manually select everyone, which I estimate would take over two hours. Here’s a little trick that was shown to me by Michael Yurechko that will allow you to select all your Facebook friends automatically.

Tell Your Friends About My Fan Page

The best way to demo how this system works is to have you actually do it by inviting your Facebook friends to join my Fan page. Go to my Fan page and click the “Suggest to friends” link. This will bring up a pop up box with a list of your friends to invite. Normally, you would have to manually select everyone on your list. However, enter the following line of code into your browser’s URL field and it will automatically select all your friends.

javascript:elms=document.getElementById(‘friends’).getElementsByTagName(‘li’);for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === ‘object’){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}

If you have a lot of friend, it may take a minute or two before everyone gets selected. Now, just hit the “Send Invitation” button and an invite will go to your friends asking them to become a fan of John Chow dot Com. That’s it, you’re done! You can use this for any Facebook invite. Have a big party you want to promote? Use this to send everyone an invite!

If you’ve found this post helpful, then please send an invite to all your Facebook friends and tell them to become my fan. It’s really easy. Just follow the steps above.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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How To Make Your Facebook Fan Page Go Viral, Invite All Friends

With all the buzz on Google Buzz, I decided it was time to integrate a “Buzz This” button into my blog the way I integrated my Tweet This button. While I don’t see Google Buzz exceeding Twitter anytime soon, I’m not blind to the increasing number of Buzz followers I have and the sheer marketing power Google processes. To ignore Buzz, or anything, from Google would be a big mistake.

The Buzz This Button

The Google Buzz This button allows your readers to Buzz your post to their followers. It works the same way as the Tweet This button. Adding the button to your blog is extremely easy. There are already a bunch of WordPress plugins that will do it for you. However, I feel the use of a plugin to do something that requires only one line of code to be an extremely poor use of resources. Instead, I just used the following code.

&title=”>

Insert the above code (change the URL to your domain name and upload and link to your own Buzz image) to your Wordpress single.php file at the point where you want the Buzz This button to show up. In my case, I have it appear right after the post and next to my Tweet This button.

The advantage of using a line of code instead of a plugin is less overhead. A simple line of code consume less resources than an entire WordPress plugin so your blog should run faster. However, if the thought of editing your blog HTML intimidates you, then go ahead and use one of the plugins.

Now, please buzz my post and tell me if it works!

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How To Add A Google Buzz This Button Into Your WordPress Blog

Sometimes when you perform a search at Google, you may notice that search results shown from some forums might include additional information, such as how many posts are in a thread, how many authors participated, and when the last post was made, like in the following search snippet:

If you’ve seen those types of results and [...]

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Google’s Specialized Forum and Discussion Thread Search Results

When I made my post about how to use prepop to build a big mailing list I showed you how to get an Aweber account for only $1. However, I didn’t have any special offer for Squeeze Theme. So I called up my friend Nate Whitehill at Unique Blog Designs and asked him to give you a deal. He sent me the following coupon code which you can use to get 25% off.

198E363FB4

Enter the above code at checkout and you’ll get 25% off the listed price of Squeeze Theme. That’s a savings of $36.75. This is the biggest discount Unique Blog Designs has ever given on their best selling squeeze page creator. But you must act fast. The coupon expires at the end of this week.

Click Here To Get Squeeze Theme for 25% Off

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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This Week Only – 25% Off Squeeze Theme

After a week off I found it a little hard to get myself going again this morning. So I procrastinated on Twitter by posting some adapted Karate Kid quotes with some pics. It never was intended to be anything more than just the first one…. but my followers kind of egged me on (shifting the blame).

Here are the pics I pumped out over about 10 minutes – I thought putting them together into a post might serve as a permanent and public reminder of the dangers of wasting time on Twitter (a great lesson for bloggers going into the new year.

PS: don’t read too much into them or base your blogging upon the following

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Advice for Bloggers: Karate Kid Style

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Advice for Bloggers: Karate Kid Style

Here are the ten winners of for the Affiliate Summit West 2010 Gold Passes. These passes are worth $549 each and entitles the winners admission to the Affiliate Meet Market, Exhibit Hall, Keynotes, Sunday educational sessions, access to all recorded session videos, PowerPoint presentations and Affiliate Summit Social Network.

It was tough deciding who to award the passes to because there were so many good entries. However, after over an hour of deliberation, I’m please to congrats the following winners:

• Chris Tew
• Ben Spark
• Tad Wolf
• Kirk Taylor
• Eugene Gregorio
• Martin
• Mark S
• Michael H.
• Adrian Childers
• Zee

Congrats to all the winners. I will be sending each one of you an email with your Affiliate Summit West 2010 Gold Pass. I’ll see you guys in Las Vegas!

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Affiliate Summit West 2010 Gold Pass Winners

Clickbooth has released XTracks, a free Pay Per Click tracking solution that’s powered by Tracking202, one of the best affiliate marketing tracking system on the Net. With XTracks, affiliates can check how well their affiliate campaigns does in real time.

If you have ever used the Tracking202 before, then you have a good idea on what Xtracks is able to do. Clickbooth provides a free hosted version of XTracks, which only requires a simple login. From there, affiliate publishers can begin tracking valuable marketing data immediately. You must be a Clickbooth publisher/affilaite in order to use XTracks.

Along with XTracks, Clickbooth is launching a new publisher interface that offers a lot more feature than the previous version. Watch the following video to see the new interface and what tools and technologies are available to Clickbooth publishers.

Sign Up for Clickbooth XTracks

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Clickbooth Releases XTracks Beta – A Free PPC Profitability Tracker

There are those who say that a blog making over $40,000 a month doesn’t need any tweaks. Fortunately, I am not one of them. Just because you have achieved an income level that you never thought possible does not mean you can relax in the sun all day long.

There Is Always Room for Improvement

No matter how big your blog gets or how much money it makes, there is always room for improvement and this is where tweaking comes in. You will be amazed by what even a small adjustment can do. Sometimes the tweaks don’t work but you’ll never know until you try it. Let me show you a real life example on how I tweak my blog.

Case Study – Aweber Lightbox

Aweber recently introduced a new web form generator tool that allows anyone with no design skills to easily set up and create an email signup form for their blog. The tool is very easy to use and one more reason why I love Aweber so much. I used the form generator tool to create the following Lightbox Hover signup form.

While the new Lightbox looked way better than the old one, it didn’t perform as well. I thought about switching back to the original Lightbox but decided to work with the new Lightbox to see if I can tweak to the point where it would match or outperform the old one. Going back to the Aweber web form generator, I fool around with the text, color, layout and came up with this.

The new Lightbox performed much better and was able to matched the sign up rate of the original Lightbox. At this point, I could have left it but I decided to keep tweaking. I moved the photo of the eBook to the right and that increased sign up a bit more. Then I played around with the wording. The final Lightbox looked like this.

Every time I made a change I would test it for 24 hours to see the results. A nice feature of Aweber is the built in stats that allows you to track the sign up rate. After making a change, I would reset the stats to zero and let it run for 24 hours. If it shows an improvement, I would keep the change the tweak something else. It it shows a decrease, I would undo the change and tweak something else. I even test the delay time for the Lightbox to fade in and found that eight seconds produced the highest sign up rate.

Tweak And Keep Tweaking – Never Settle

The take away from all this is to never settle for what you got. There is always something you can do to improve things. To get the most out of your tweaking, keep the following in mind.

• Have a clear goal on what you want to achieve
• Tweak one thing at a time
• Give time for your tweaks to take effect
• Track the tweak with hard stats, don’t guess
• Have fun with it

So far, I’ve managed to increase my newsletter sign up rate by 50% over the original Lightbox. I’m not done yet. Next, I’ll be split testing two Lightboxes to see which one performs better. Once you start tweaking, you just can’t seem to stop.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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The Importance of Tweaking